Festival of New Cinema, Digital Culture & Art Manchester & Across
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29 Aug – 02 Sep 2012 Festival of New Cinema, Digital Culture & Art Manchester & across the North West andfestival.org.uk Exhibitions Festival of New Cinema, Digital Culture and Art This summer, Abandon Normal Devices invites you to experience a festival that highlights the complexities, gradations and anomalies encountered when we examine success as an ideal. AND 2012 is as much about work evolving over time, artists experimenting, and setting ambitious parameters, as it is about finished exhibitions. The experience of success can be fleeting and addictive. A strategy for survival; a money-spinner and a motivator: Rewards can have us going around in circles, travelling far but getting nowhere. We have become the status chasing generation; #winning is our meme. Through unusual strategies, the artists and filmmakers working in this year’s festival reveal alternative ways of being by offering rich counterpoints to perfection and undermining accepted logic. During a kaleidoscopic five days, unlikely monuments will be inflated, failed technological dreams will be resurrected and extinct industries will be salvaged and rebuilt. We share artworks, which hold a mirror to celebrity culture and shirk responsibility for the financial crash. Alongside these are a number of events that focus on self-improvement, from workshops to enhance your charisma, make-overs that better-prepare you for 2020 and teenagers on-site and online ready to solve all your problems. This, plus a cacophony of late-night actions and events make up our festival in 2012. We accept that, whenever we strive for something new, there is always the chance we will fail, but in a hyper-competitive Olympic year, AND’s attention is drawn to subtlety, humour, vulnerability and tenacity. Are you big enough to fail? Welcome to Abandon Normal Devices Images: Top: The Humble Market, Bottom: It’s Cool, I’m Good. It’s Cool, I’m Good The Humble Market The Humble Market is a fusion of theatre Contents and media art from the Brazil-UK theatre Stanya Kahn Zecora Ura and artists network Zecora Ura and new media artists Alastair Eilbeck and James Bailey. Cornerhouse Jorge Lopes Ramos, Zecora Ura is famous for its award winning Fri 22 Jun - Sun 16 Sep, Tue - Sat six hour production Hotel Medea. 12:00 - 20:00, Sun 12:00 - 18:00 Alastair Eilbeck, FREE, Drop in James Bailey and This, their latest production is inspired by the 03 Exhibitions rise of Brazil as an economic power. It toys 08 Public Realm AND is proud to present It’s Cool, Persis-Jade Maravala with the follies of mass consumerism, and I’m Good, the first UK solo exhibition uses the marketplace as a metaphor to ask of works by American artist Stanya Kahn. Exhibition: Trade Secrets 11 Screenings FACT (Foundation for Art & Technology) what do we really trade? What should be 16 Events Characterised by her signature blend Fri 22 Jun - Sun 29 Aug, Sun - Fri traded? And what cannot be bought? of dark comedy, visceral characters 12:00 - 18:00, Sat 11:00 - 18:00 The experience begins in Liverpool with 18 Talks & Workshops and reluctant optimism, Kahn’s exhibition FREE, Booking required a choreographed journey through the features a selection of recent drawings ‘marketplace’ of Galleries 1 & 2 at FACT. 20 Artists at Work and video works. The video works navigate Performance: We Play Expo, Avenham and Miller Parks, Preston It culminates with a promenading theatre 21 Online personal trauma, resilience and recovery. production that includes a live link-up Mundane interactions and casual jokes belie Fri 07 - Sun 09 Sep, 20:00 and 22:00 22 Venues & Booking Information FREE, Booking required between Belo Horizonte and Preston, a deeper consciousness of environmental one of the oldest market towns in the 24 Festival Timetable concerns and social and political alienation. North of England. As people are connected 27 Funders & Partners Whether made of flesh and blood, plastic across two different cultures and one vast or crumpled paper, her characters’ struggle body of water, you are invited to ponder for success (or mere survival) in a profoundly the question: how Brazilian will we all be absurd world is thrown into relief by an by 2020? underlying current of self-deprecating Credits: The Humble Market is a co-production between Abandon and occasionally fragile humour. Normal Devices, FACT and Derry - Londonderry - City of Culture 2013 and WE PLAY, commissioned by AND, FACT, WE PLAY Expo Credits: Co-commission between Abandon Normal Devices and Derry - Londonderry - City of Culture 2013, and London 2012 and Cornerhouse. Festival funded by Legacy Trust UK and Arts Council England. 02 Introduction / Exhibitions / Public Realm / Screenings / Events / Talks & Workshops / Artists At Work / Online / Venues & Booking Information / Festival Timetable andfestival.org.uk 03 Exhibitions In the run-up to AND Festival we invite you Ask A Teenager to submit your problems to us online and Pigs Bladder Football Reproductive Futures Mammalian Diving we’ll pass them onto our panel of teens. John O’Shea Zoe Papadopoulou They’ll work on your problem with their Reflex highly adaptable brains and get back CUBE (Centre for the Urban Built CUBE (Centre for the Urban Built Environment) Environment) Number One First Street to you with their advice through our Thu 30 Aug - Fri 07 Sep, 12:00 - 17:00 Thu 30 Aug - Fri 07 Sep, 12:00 - 17:00 Sat 01 Sep website or during two live performances FREE, Drop in FREE, Drop in Live performances: 13:00 & 15:00 at First Street. The performances will be FREE, Booking required accompanied by video documentation Pigs Bladder Football launched one year We are all familiar with the stories about exhibited in First Street, featuring footage ago by setting out a remarkable challenge: what the stork brought and the birds Teenagers are famously complex from the teens’ deliberations. by August 2012, artist John O’Shea would and the bees – Papadopoulou asks how and emotionally unstable. Their limbic culture the world’s first bio-engineered these stories will evolve in an age of systems are on overdrive, their hormones Submit your problem to andfestival.org.uk football, grown from living cells. Since invitro fertilisation and stem cell research. are running amok, they’re prone to staying Commissioned by Abandon Normal Devices. November 2011, O’Shea has been artist Looking towards the not-so-distant future up late, sleeping well past noon and taking in residence at the University of Liverpool’s when sperm and eggs can be created from crazy risks. It’s no accident. Scientists Panel Discussion Clinical Engineering Unit where he has anyone’s cells regardless of age, gender believe that their brains are particularly Number One First Street collaborated with Professor John Hunt or sexuality, this project investigates how alive, active and sensitive. Their behaviour Sat 01 Sep, 16:30 and Theun Van Veen to develop bespoke scientific and technological developments is an evolutionary feature: it’s how teens protocols for harvesting animal tissue. influence the historical stories and narratives define and distinguish themselves; it’s how Join us for a panel discussion with Through biological experimentation, rapid that explain where we come from. It aims to they get shit done. Teen brains are fast, Darren O’ Donnell, founder and director prototyping and an iterative design process, create the space for a broader discussion on risk-taking blobs that make creative and of Mammalian Diving Reflex, Neil Winterburn this work has been an exercise of precise artificial reproductive technologies (ART) and sometimes bizarre leaps and associations, who facilitated the project workshops tissue engineering. The final ball, which on how our perceptions of childbearing and giving them an adaptive edge. This is a and Gaby Jenks, AND Festival Manager. will be produced by replicating the same parenthood are headed for a radical change. scientific fact. We’ll also be joined by the young people techniques used to create artificial human who led on the project. Credits: Funded by the Wellcome Trust organs, encourages us to consider the that role life sciences will have in our daily lives both today and in the future. It also references the colliding worlds of human enhancement, the bio-technology industry and the global capitalisation of sport, which have become highly contested areas. How will changing the material properties of the ball affect the rules of our beautiful game? pigsbladderfootball.com Artist’s Talk National Football Museum Sat 01 Sep, 14:00 - 16:00 FREE, Booking required Credits: Pigs Bladder Football is a new commission for Abandon Normal Devices 2012. The work is funded by the Wellcome Trust and developed in collaboration with the University of Liverpool Clinical Engineering Unit. Clearing United Holding Company UHC Project Live: Thu 30 Aug - Sun 02 Sep, 11:00 - 18:00 Public Debate: Sun 02 Sep, 12:00 FREE, Drop in Clearing is a new work by Ultimate Holding Company (UHC) that seeks to create a dialogue around the subject of higher arts education and the globalized trade in ‘knowledge capital’. The piece takes data from the University and Colleges Admissions Service (UCAS) and the London Stock Exchange to create an animated digital display. During the installation, UHC will host a public debate on the value of higher education in the arts, with a panel of specially invited guests. Credits: A new work by UHC commissioned by Abandon Normal Devices. Images: This page: Top left: Pigs Bladder Football, Top right: Reproductive Futures, Bottom: Clearing. Opposite